They're increasingly nothing more than a platform like eBay or Alibaba (soon they'll have the ad business to match). However that won't save them from having to be careful as their dominance continues to increase. If you own the $200 billion platform, you wield the power, not the little guy selling $100k or $1m worth of merchandise per year. Regulators will focus on the platform owner and any broad market abuses that harm consumers. Bezos potentially going toward $200 billion in personal wealth guarantees they'll perpetually be a target, it doesn't matter how good they are to consumers, that much concentrated economic power terrifies a lot of people; his wealth alone will be taken by many as evidence of wrong doing, it's a lightning rod for attention. Gates solved that by pledging to give most of his wealth away and moving to philanthropy as a primary focus. Bezos is going to have a harder time based on what he has said he plans to do (assuming Amazon's insane valuation doesn't implode after this round of the asset inflation party ends).
I think what's also interesting is that now that Microsoft is awake with Nadella at the helm and presenting a viable alternative, will Amazon's cloud business start losing marketshare.
If I were say, Procter and Gamble/Clorox (Consumer Staples), Macy's (Consumer Discretionary), Visa/Fedex (E-Commerce), Aetna (Healthcare) if I were going to look at options for cloud, would I host my enterprise on Amazon who is actively trying compete with me and provide the end customer with alternatives to my product/services? Or would I go with a vertical pure play cloud services provider like Microsoft.
